Slan, all. I'm finally getting around to reposting all of my various fics to the new forums. As I will have a computer within a week, this may even see a few new posts in due time.

For those who aren't familiar with it, this story takes place some four hundred years before TPM takes place, and details the slow slippage into the Dark that some Jedi have inevitably experienced. It's all original characters, so no one can be blamed but me. But thanks to GL for letting us play in his (huge) sandbox!

I hope you like it!

*Derisa*

Fifth month, 1563 (?)

I add the question mark, beause the further I progress in researching the Prophecy, the more it becomes obvious that the transfer of the Temple?s records after the consolidation has played havoc with our dates. Records dated 1345, for instance, detail galactic events that we know took place a full eighty years earlier. The lack of an enforced standard is only one, relatively minor difficulty that plagues me in my task of aligning and consolidating the Archives. I know what year it is, it is a pale attempt at humour.

My most recent work has been absorbing too much of my time, and I am forced to ask the Temple for a reprieve on their request to take an Apprentice. I am all too aware how many hormonal teenagers are running about the Temple, forcing me to clutch vainly after some semblance of tranquility that I may focus upon this immense task they have set me. We shall see what Master Iridanuu says. She?ll likely appeal to my pride again, and she has a point: ?Master Lored? does sound more learned than ?Ser Lored?. She knows me too well.

The work progresses only slowly, due in part to those pubescent hordes, but also, I am forced to invent new data transference techniques every second day, to align all the various methods of sensory recordings.

It hardly strains my resources, but my patience suffers for the constant interruptions of the real work of analysing the data for some hint as to the time frame.

The Whills hid everything in sixteen layers of self-reference, but the Council presses its questions: When will this Chosen One appear? What signs and portents will herald his coming? As the senior and most respected members of our Order, they don?t take it well when I remind them that patience is the most Jedi of virtues.